Allowing patented intellectual property into web standards is a horrible idea. It totally contradicts the purpose of the W3C and the Web itself.
While this proposal clearly benefits your mega-corporation employers (Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Philips, and Apple), do you really want to go down in history, personally, as the people who took the Worldwide Web away from the free world, and gave the gigantic patent-owning corporations free reign to smother its standards in proprietary IP?
It is hard to imagine a more blatant and shameless attempt to kill open software.
Michele, Scott, Tony, Barry, Daniel, Wanda, Mark, and Helene, you folks should be ashamed of yourselves for proposing such a thing.
-Tim